This blog exists purely as a place for me to dump random links and thoughts I have rather than emailing them to my friends. It'll have large amounts of inside jokes. Also there will probably be times when I write "you" or refer to an email. Just pretend that you are reading an email to you. If you don't know me you likely won't find anything here interesting. If you do know me you also will not find anything here interesting.

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

MP3s as a litmus test for good journalism

The MP3 format was invented by a German group in the early 90s. They patented it, and licensed it out to companies. This is the reason many open source programs force you to download MP3 libraries separately.

The last patents for mp3 expire this year (2017). Now anyone can use it without having to worry about licenses. The group that created it announced they would stop licensing it (since they can't) and suggested people move to AAC (since they still own patents on that).

The result is news organizations running stories with headlines like "MP3 is Dead". This presents and interesting look into which sources are reliable sources for tech news, and which use hyperbolic headlines for the sake of clicks.

I went to Google News and searched for recent articles that mentioned 'MP3'. Some of these were pretty obvious, but some were surprising. To be fair, some are technically correct, in saying the creator declared it dead, vs saying it actually is dead, but merely parroting a press release is still going under the 'Bad' category. The BBC was close, but I put it in good because it didn't feel clickbaity to me, feel free to disagree.

Finally, I won't pretend like this single example is some end all test for who you should and shouldn't trust, it's just and interesting source of some empirical data.